Starting your own business can mean being a one-man band for quite some time, meaning you’ll be taking care of all the marketing, accounting and networking. If you have no idea where to start with your marketing strategy, these top tips can steer you in the right direction.
After all, if you aren’t making the effort to do marketing right, do you have any hope of making sales? It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, if people don’t know about it or can’t find it, you’ll never get that much-needed revenue coming in.
It doesn’t matter if you already know a little about marketing or have no experience whatsoever, this list will help you to get off the ground.
Take a course
If you’re really serious about developing a strategy, then taking a marketing course or attending a seminar that focuses on sales skills training and techniques is going to be essential. You don’t need a degree in marketing to get started, but sometimes a bit of formal training can give you better results more quickly than aimlessly browsing the web. There’s a lot of information out there, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel conflicted when faced with five blogs telling you different things.
Set up social media
No matter the industry you’re in, you’ll want to set up some kind of social media profile to market your business. Even if you don’t think your customers will be on social media, chances are they have at least one account that they frequent. And don’t worry about keeping up with a schedule, it’s easy to create all your content for a few weeks or even a month in one go. Then you can set up a queue using a computer program that will then post the content for you.
Use SEO
If you haven’t already optimized your website to rank on search engines, you should make this a priority. Most SEO strategies are made up of a combination of producing high-quality content and securing backlinks from reputable websites. This might all sound a bit alien at the moment, but once you have your SEO strategy set up, all you have to do is maintain it. Of course, you can always hire a freelancer or agency to do most of the hard work for you.
Research your audience
Lots of startups make the mistake of thinking they already know who their customer is without research, but it’s important to know that you are not your ideal customer. Even if your product is built on a need you once had, the people who are coming to you for this same service will have varying needs. Base your customer profiles on real data. It will take time to gather this information, but once you do, you’ll be able to hone in on who is more likely to convert and make you money.
Marketing might seem straightforward on the surface, but underneath there’s a lot of knowledge that goes into making your strategy a success.
